Title
My Neighbour Zotero (article/paper collection and research tool, citation management, bibliography, ...)Plan
- 2 min intro to Zotero https://www.zotero.org/
- install to VM, populate with some example data, demo as I go
- investigate backing up profile
- stretch goal: integration with desktop search like Recoll https://www.recoll.org/
Live notes (tidied)
I like to have local copies of papers/articles/blog-posts I found interesting
Worst feeling is when you want to revisit at article and it’s vanished from the web.
Sometimes the Internet Archive Wayback Machine https://web.archive.org/ will have a copy — but not always.
why not use built-in Microsoft Windows backup
2 reasons:
- because they push you towards renting storage from them
- I’m a bit of a control freak when it comes to backups — I want to see the files on the backup target, and have the target device I fully control.
I use https://www.borgbackup.org/
local backup of Zotero is simple: just copy the data dir
ref https://www.zotero.org/support/zotero_data
On Windows, I’ve found it best make sure Zotero isn’t running when you do this (it complains about files in use)
Search
Zotero has own search, but I want my Recoll desktop search to include my Zotero data
At a past job I remember writing things in various silos:
- Issue tracking (Atlassian JIRA)
- Team wikis (Atlassian Confluence)
- Emails (Exchange, Outlook)
- Instant messaging (Microsoft Teams)
- Source code:
- Subversion/SVN repositories
- git repositories in Bitbucket
- git repositories in Gitlab
- Formal documents on a shared network drive
- Private notes (org-mode)
If I couldn’t remember which of these I wrote it down in, I’d have to search each one in turn :-(
one solution: daily cron job to export
Might be easier to periodically export entire Zotero data to (e.g.) markdown and have Recoll search that.
Alternative: making sure Recoll indexes both:
- Zotero data dir
storagesubdirectory (which has the PDFs), and: sqlite3 zotero.sqlite .dump(which has metadata, notes)
existing solutions: not finding any
A few people asking, but no joy
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/20086062/make-recoll-index-sqlite-files
https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/115329/recoll-full-text-search
Recoll document input handler
Formerly called “filters”
https://www.recoll.org/usermanual/webhelp/docs/RCL.PROGRAM.FILTERS.html
It’s probably not the quickest solution but I’m interested in this and I might re-use this knowledge for similar desktop search issues I’m having
asides (A lot of them today but it was fun :D)
“Web-Based Live Speech-Driven Lip-Sync.”
A nice short paper I used when making my rudimentary vtuber:
Llorach, Gerard, Alun Evans, Josep Blat, Giso Grimm, and Volker Hohmann. “Web-Based Live Speech-Driven Lip-Sync.” In 2016 8th International Conference on Games and Virtual Worlds for Serious Applications (VS-GAMES), 1–4. Barcelona, Spain: IEEE, 2016. https://doi.org/10.1109/VS-GAMES.2016.7590381.
neat little spectrogram and tone generator web app
Live demo http://borismus.github.io/spectrogram
Source code: https://github.com/borismus/spectrogram
Handy tool and reference when I was messing around with web audio APIs and the lip-sync paper above
voidtools Everything for Windows — very fast filename search
hooks into the filesystem so it’s always up to date
Intertwingularity — knowledge defies categorization
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intertwingularity
Highlights my own
[Ted Nelson] wrote in Computer Lib/Dream Machines “EVERYTHING IS DEEPLY INTERTWINGLED. In an important sense there are no “subjects” at all; there is only all knowledge, since the cross-connections among the myriad topics of this world simply cannot be divided up neatly.” […]
“Hierarchical and sequential structures, especially popular since Gutenberg, are usually forced and artificial. Intertwingularity is not generally acknowledged — people keep pretending they can make things hierarchical, categorizable and sequential when they can’t.”
Markdown is popular but as your documents get more complicated you hit limits
(full disclosure: I’ve been using org-mode for a very long time)
Also the number of Markdown variants annoys me.
Oxide and Friends talked about moving from Markdown to Asciidoc for their RFDs (RFC-style planning and architecture decision documentation)
https://oxide-and-friends.transistor.fm/episodes/rfds-the-backbone-of-oxide/transcript
-
Oxide and Friends podcast is a great listen in general
The Oxide Computer team are a good bunch, IMHO.